Read It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock Online
Authors: Charlotte Chandler
Tags: #Direction & Production, #Film & Video, #Performing Arts, #Motion Picture Producers and Directors - Great Britain, #Hitchcock; Alfred, #Entertainment & Performing Arts, #Great Britain, #Motion Picture Producers and Directors, #Biography & Autobiography, #Individual Director, #Biography
It's Only a Movie: Alfred Hitchcock (8 page)
to
Waltzes from Vienna
O
N
D
ECEMBER
2, 1926, Hitch and Alma were married in a small Roman Catholic ceremony. Alma converted to Catholicism.
They spent their honeymoon in Paris and at the Palace Hotel in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The Palace perfectly suited the young Hitchcocks’ dreams and their reality. Afterward, they celebrated their anniversary there whenever they could.
Back in London, they moved into their new flat, decorated with fabrics and furniture from Liberty’s Department Store. It was a top-story flat, something that never bothered them, although Pat Hitchcock told me that she remembered in 1936, at the age of eight, counting ninety-six steps from the ground floor to their flat. It was where they were to live until they left for America.
When the Hitchcocks married, their future seemed far from secure. During 1927, however, all three of the films he had directed were finally released. Four more were finished that year, and Hitchcock was becoming the most famous British director.
Downhill,
Hitchcock’s next film, was based on a play by Ivor Novello and Constance Collier, writing under the pseudonym Robert LeStrange.
School sports captain Roddy Berwick (Ivor Novello), accused of fathering a waitress’s child, doesn’t expose the true seducer, his best friend, Tim Wakely (Robin Irvine). Roddy is expelled from school, and when even his own father, Lord Berwick (Norman McKinnel), doubts his innocence, Roddy leaves home.
Joining the chorus of a stage musical, he falls in love with the star, Julia (Isabel Jeans), but cannot afford her extravagant lifestyle.
Then, Roddy inherits £30,000. The sum appears very large in an intertitle:
£30,000
He buys an expensive flat, and Julia moves in with him. She is having an affair with the musical’s leading man, Archie (Ian Hunter), and they squander Roddy’s inheritance, living lavishly. The intertitle is now very small:
£30,000
Roddy loses both Julia and the flat.
He becomes a taxi dancer in Paris, ending up in a Marseilles flophouse, where the operators hope to collect a reward for returning him to his rich family.
Roddy finds himself on a freighter. Hallucinating, taunted by the memory of those who victimized him, he relives his downhill descent.
Awakening in an English port, he makes his way through a nightmare-like montage of familiar London scenes and arrives at his family mansion.
His father, having learned the truth of the waitress’s seduction, welcomes him back, as does his alma mater.
An important scene shows Ivor Novello riding down a long escalator in the London subway. “We couldn’t film in the Underground until after midnight,” Hitchcock said, “so it was perfect for going to the theater. There was an opening night, and if you were in the good seats, you wore white tie and top hat.
“When the performance finished, I wore my formal attire to direct Novello going down the escalator into the Underground.”
At one point in the film, Isabel Jeans leans back and looks at Ivor Novello, who has just entered her dressing room. The next shot shows what she sees, an upside-down Novello. For Hitchcock, this became a favorite moment in his films. He repeated the effect in
Notorious
with Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant.
Another favorite moment occurs in his next film,
Easy Virtue.
Hitchcock described the scene as “actually a monologue without words.”
“It lasts about one minute and is in one small set, where a hotel switchboard operator [Benita Hume] sits. She is wearing earphones, reading a romantic novel.
“She plugs into a conversation between a young woman and a young man who is proposing marriage. Neither the young woman nor the young man is shown. The audience is in suspense, along with the operator. Will the girl on the phone say yes? The switchboard operator, living vicariously, is ecstatic, showing the audience that the proposal has been accepted.”
Work on
Easy Virtue
started even before
Downhill
was completed. Because Ivor Novello had not been available for his final close-ups in
Downhill,
Hitchcock arranged to shoot them while he was filming
Easy Virtue
in the south of France.
The film was adapted from a play by Noël Coward, famed for his witty dialogue, but it has few intertitles. “The only thing wrong with the silent picture was that mouths opened, and nothing came out,” Hitchcock said. “The talking picture only partially solved that problem.”
Larita Filton (Isabel Jeans) flees England for the French Riviera after enduring a sensational divorce trial. In the south of France, she falls in love with John Whitaker (Robin Irvine), who knows nothing about her past. He proposes, and the couple returns to England where she is introduced to his family at their mansion.
John’s dominating mother (Violet Farebrother) grudgingly accepts her, but Larita seems vaguely familiar.
Fearful her past will be discovered, Larita pleads with John to take her back to the south of France, where they were happy.
John’s mother recognizes Larita from a newspaper photo. While other members of the family are willing to accept Larita, Mrs. Whitaker is resolute, insisting her son divorce the infamous woman.
Larita returns to divorce court and the headlines. Touching her heart, she tells photographers on the courthouse steps, “Go ahead and shoot—there’s nothing left to kill.”
These last words from Larita, spoken in an intertitle, represented for Hitchcock his least favorite line written by him in any of his films. Today, the line seems more perceptive and appropriate.
The power of the media to ruin private lives, finding an individual guilty, not by conviction, but by implication, is a theme that has become even more timely. Apparently the news photographers of 1927 really were not different from the paparazzi who pursue celebrities today.
In
Easy Virtue
, Larita meets her mother-in-law in the same way Alicia Huberman, played by Ingrid Bergman, would meet hers years later in
Notorious.
A menacing figure of an older woman comes down a staircase, “descending and condescending,” as Hitchcock put it, toward her new daughter-in-law.
T
WO EVENTS THAT
would have far-reaching effects on the British film industry occurred in late 1927. The first was the successful introduction of synchronized sound with
The Jazz Singer.
The second was the Cinematograph Films Act, “The Quota Act,” requiring cinemas to program a certain number of British films each year.
A new film company, British International Pictures, lured Alfred Hitchcock away from Gainsborough. He was promised bigger budgets and greater artistic freedom. His first film for BIP was
The Ring.
Hitchcock wrote the screenplay for this film in a few weeks.
He had “fallen in love” with the setting of the boxing ring. Though he had never boxed, nor followed boxing, when friends took him to a boxing match, he recognized what a wonderful setting it made. “I observed those people in the best seats, close to the ring, ladies and gentlemen, and some who weren’t, but who could pay the price, wearing formal clothes!” The brutality in the ring, the screaming audience in the cheap seats, and champagne being poured over the boxers to revive them, caught Hitchcock’s fancy, and gave him the inspiration for
The Ring.
Amateur boxer Jack Sander (Carl Brisson) works in a carnival side show where he is known as “One Round Jack.” His girlfriend, Mabel (Lillian Hall-Davis), sells tickets to those who hope to last more than one round with Jack, for which they will receive a prize of 2 guineas.
Champion boxer Bob Corby (Ian Hunter), attracted to Mabel, enters the ring with Jack. Unrecognized, Bob knocks Jack out in the second round, but Jack impresses the champion’s manager, who offers him a job as Bob’s sparring partner.
Though engaged to marry Jack, Mabel accepts an arm bracelet from Bob, a gift he bought for her with his prize money.
With Jack’s new job as Bob’s sparring partner, he and Mabel can afford to get married, but Mabel is also attracted to Bob.
As Jack’s career advances, Mabel has an affair with Bob. Jack and Mabel quarrel, and she leaves him. Jack publicly challenges Bob to a fight in the ring.
The fight goes against Jack, until Mabel rushes to his corner. Jack wins both the fight and Mabel, with Bob conceding defeat like a gentleman. The bracelet is left on the floor of the ring.
“Before the big climax in the ring,” Hitchcock said, “I instructed the cameraman to under-crank, so that the action would seem to go faster for the audience. I did that later in the merry-go-round sequence in
Strangers on a Train.
Then, I told Brisson to go after Hunter just as he would in a real match.
“After about five minutes, Hunter, who was out of shape, just sat down on the mat. On the film, it looks as if he got knocked down. He was complimented for a great performance by everyone.”
In the background of
The Ring
is a young Tom Helmore, who, thirty years later, would play Gavin Elster in
Vertigo.
W
HILE
H
ITCHCOCK WAS
preparing his next film,
The Farmer’s Wife,
in late 1927, the Hitchcocks were expecting their first child.
Hitchcock worked with Eliot Stannard on the adaptation of Eden Phillpotts’s play, and he also doubled as lighting cameraman, though without credit, when Jack Cox became ill.
The Farmer’s Wife
was released in March 1928.
The wife of prosperous Devonshire farmer, Samuel Sweetland (Jameson Thomas), dies, leaving him a widower with a teenage daughter. His wife’s last words, to their servant girl Araminta (Lillian Hall-Davis), are, “Don’t forget to air your master’s pants, Minta.”
Always in good spirits, Minta takes care of Sweetland and his daughter. Minta’s drying of Sweetland’s underwear, by the fire in winter and in the sun in summer, marks the passage of time.
Sweetland’s daughter (Mollie Ellis) marries. Lonely, he faces his wife’s empty rocking chair.
Sweetland decides to remarry. He and Minta make a list of candidates. He imagines each one sitting in his wife’s empty chair.
When all of them reject the confident Sweetland, he returns to his farm, humiliated, and Minta reassures him. As she sits in the chair vacated by his wife, Sweetland suddenly sees the truth.
He proposes to her, and she happily accepts his proposal. Some of the women who had rejected Sweetland reconsider, but they are too late.
Minta appears wearing the party dress his wife had given her, and she is beautiful. It is Minta who will sit in the empty chair.
Director Ronald Neame, at the time beginning his own film career at the Elstree Studios, said that he owed a great deal to a joke played on him while
The Farmer’s Wife
was being filmed.
“I was just starting out, and I was terribly overeager. Someone sent me to fetch the ‘sky hook,’ which I was told was a terribly valuable piece of equipment. I looked all over until I got to
The Farmer’s Wife
set. A rather plump twenty-seven-year-old director named Alfred Hitchcock was rehearsing the actors.
“For several minutes, I forgot all about the sky hook and watched the great director at work. Then I approached Hitchcock’s cameraman, Jack Cox.
“This kind man said, ‘You have been given a sort of initiation, because the sky hook is a leg-pull. Why don’t you go back and tell them it was sold last week because it wasn’t being used.’
“Because of that nonexistent sky hook, I was able to watch Hitchcock directing, and I met Jack Cox, with whom I would be working.”